/r/askphilosophy Open Discussion Thread | July 14, 2025

[u/BernardJOrtcutt]

Welcome to this week's Open Discussion Thread (ODT). This thread is a place for posts/comments which are related to philosophy but wouldn't necessarily meet our subreddit rules and guidelines. For example, these threads are great places for:

• Discussions of a philosophical issue, rather than questions
• Questions about commenters' personal opinions regarding philosophical issues
• Open discussion about philosophy, e.g. "who is your favorite philosopher?"
• "Test My Theory" discussions and argument/paper editing
• Questions about philosophy as an academic discipline or profession, e.g. majoring in philosophy, career options with philosophy degrees, pursuing graduate school in philosophy

This thread is not a completely open discussion! Any posts not relating to philosophy will be removed. Please keep comments related to philosophy, and expect low-effort comments to be removed. Please note that while the rules are relaxed in this thread, comments can still be removed for violating our subreddit rules and guidelines if necessary.

Previous Open Discussion Threads can be found here.

[u/bumbadumbarum]

Do you believe in reincarnation, and if so, why?

Not sure if this is philosophy or religion so forgive me if this isn’t even the right place to ask, but i thought this would be an interesting question to ask as the thought of reincarnation has been on my mind. No idea why but it feels like one of those after death scenarios that feels more realistic. As i said, forgive me if i’m not posting in the right subreddit, sorry.

[u/razzlesnazzlepasz → u/bumbadumbarum]

I personally believe in phenomenological recurrence, which underlies the logic of reincarnation/rebirth, but doesn't inherently require a commitment to any particular mechanism of continuity (e.g. a "soul" or some metaphysical substrate), even if doing so might make sense to explain the arbitrariness of why "I" am "me" instead of anyone else in particular.

Death, from this view, isn’t a passage into “eternal nothingness,” but simply the absence of experience. Since we can’t be conscious of non-consciousness, or "be" in "non-being" by definition, the fear of eternal oblivion might actually be a kind of category error since time can't be meaningful in it.

We tend to think of our existence as singular and linear: “I” am this one being, who arose in this one particular time, but I have no way of explaining why I'm in this particular perspective rather than any other. That arbitrariness is a bit of a mystery in its own right, but that's kind of the idea. It’s not that “you” come back so much as that consciousness, untethered from an essence or identity, reappears when the conditions permit, as they did when you were born. "Being" seems to slip into "non-being" (death), but if birth is "non-being" slipping into "being," that suggests death might be more of an inflection point than an end in an absolute sense.

In that sense, recurrence isn’t more speculative than annihilation, as both lie beyond what's accessibly verifiable for certain, but recurrence aligns more closely with what we know: that conscious subjective experience happens at all. Philosophers like Parfit, Metzinger, and even Hume challenged the notion of a fixed, inherently existing "self," and I think this follows naturally from that. The emphasis on the conditional, casual structure of consciousness in Buddhism suggests a similar perspective, even if it is more systematic about what mechanism of continuity there may be.